You've seen this dozens of times on Dr. Phil. Save the money, watch Dr. Phil.

This a movie of a director -Maud- who has a stroke, which renders her with a substantial motor deficit to her left side. After her stroke she continues with her career goals, preparing to direct her new movie, when she decides to cast a crook to star her movie. Up to this point the movie is understandable. Afterward the movie is just plain and lifeless. The movie becomes for the remainder almost 90 minutes a series of boring and lifeless conversations between the two, with him clearly stealing from her and with her apathetic. I ended up fast- forwarding to the end just to see the same apathetic attitude on her. I understand this is supposed to reflect a true story. But we never watch the story unfold. We watch a traumatized account of what happened. It shows how one feels that the story unfolded. In other words, the movie tells a story how the protagonist believed it happened - in a dissociative manner after the trauma - but surely not how the story did unfold. And that's why the boring becomes so lifeless - because it's so emotionless/ guarded -a reaction post trauma. Well, great acting wasted on such a terrible script.

A truly fascinating and realistic character study of a tough woman dealing with the impact of a stroke on her abilities. The three things that make this film work are 1. Isabelle Huppert's flawless work and charisma, 2. It is loosely based on Breillat's own experience and, 3. It presents a altogether surprising view of a con-artist conning a woman who almost seems to want him to push her to the level of life that most terrifies her. An audacious study of helplessness, manipulation and survival. We may not like either character, but Maud is one character that is fascinating to watch.

A wasted opportunity. This film has important things to say, but leaves most of them to the end. Leading up to that seems like a rather vapid, long vanity piece for Huppert. Just because she is an actor who moves her face little, is not a reason to make the audience look at her in interminable closeup, as if we otherwise wouldn't see what she is doing. Problems with continuity and editing, particularly in the depiction of the disability, risk mocking it. At one point Maud loses control of her body, can barely move her legs, then immediately lies on her back and kicks the hell out of her concrete bunker style door. Really? There are pointlessly offensive scenes: a senile old woman is insulted about her incontinence, and a very real-looking baby is shaken for a long time - the callousness of the characters who do these things was lost because the scenes are dreadful. The prevailing emotional climate in the film is cold, as are the production values. The festival audience was perceptibly annoyed and frustrated with the film and it risks being viewed as time and money thrown away, which is a pity, because its issues of need and exploitation, and the power of people with disability to make their own decisions, are worthy ones for the cinema.

Starts and ends in the same place and goes nowhere in between.

Huppert in a film by her long-time friend, Catherine Breillat based upon Breillat's own experience. How can you go wrong? See it. Huppert remains the most fearless actor working.

It was difficult to watch this woman being manipulated so easily into giving large amounts of money to a known con artist.

In its last haunting moments, ABUSE OF WEAKNESS underscores how really brilliant Isabelle Huppert is. But the film simply has no insights to share about a very interesting predicament that actually happened to filmmaker Catherine Breillet who I usually adore. This film lacks her usual insight and passion. Perhaps the embrarrassment of the story was simply too much for her to handle. But Huppert is simply astonishing in every way especially in that final still moment when she is defiant, humiliated, childish all at once. Staggering.

"Abuse of Weakness" starts with Maud Shainberg(Isabelle Huppert) waking up to feeling like half her body has died. The emergency response operator takes a glass half full approach to the situation. That helps to get Maud to the hospital where she faces a difficult recovery from a serious stroke. But even in the hospital she is planning her next movie, having already secured at least partial financing. She finds her leading man when watching Vilko Piran(Kool Shen), an ex-con, on television talking about the book he has just written. With one of her most assured movies, "Abuse of Weakness," Catherine Breillat details a real incident from her life, bravely admitting that she does not have all of the answers while asking the audience to fill in the blanks. This is not the first time she has made a cinema a clef, as she also did so with "Sex is Comedy." On the other hand, "Abuse of Weakness" is less about sex while still on the physical side of the equation as Maud finds herself trapped in her malfunctioning body while Breillat ironically finds herself trapped in one of her movies.(Thankfully, this has never happened to David Cronenberg.) Perfectly embodying that damaged physicality is Isabelle Huppert who again raises her game to yet another level.

Lacks momentum yet authentic, coupled with Isabelle Huppert's great performance.

Women's potential revolutionary power, which always seen in Catherine Breillat's previous work, is totally wiped out this time in her personal autobiographical piece. Narrative looks dragging, & even confusing sometimes. Isabelle Huppert is still the one who pulls everything up together after all, although she was rather miscast.

Catherine Breillat gets more personal than she has ever been in her entire career in her latest film Abuse of Weakness. The story is almost entirely autobiographical, and one of the only things that are changed are the names. Maud is a director who suffers a stroke. As she is recovering, she watches a con artist being interviewed on television and starts entertaining the idea of casting him in the lead part of her new film project. Soon enough the two become acquainted and she finds herself willingly loaning him large sums of money. Despite the nature of the story, Breillat is neither spiteful nor vengeful in her telling of the events. In fact, she even points to the fact that she might have had it coming. Nevertheless, she seems to be entirely focused on making the whole story seem very authentic and avoids stylistic embellishments. Breillat also avoids her characteristic strange casting antics by giving the role of her cinematic alter ego to one of the best French actresses of the last twenty years, Isabelle Huppert. Her performance as the proud yet vulnerable Maud is quite remarkable, particularly due to the role's physically demanding nature. The same cannot be said about Kool Shen, the French rapper who lacks the ability to make the con artist seem a charmer or a rogue. The two end up lacking chemistry and this makes the film drag particularly in its seemingly interminable middle part. However, Breillat can still be praised for her honesty and for bringing her own personal experiences on the big screen, coming close to a documentary style and unafraid of seeming uncomfortable.

Catherine Breillat's films have always been autobiographical, often painfully so, and yet "Abuse of Weakness" cuts even closer to the marrow than the rest. Featuring iron-nerved Isabelle Huppert as the director's onscreen equivalent, a partly crippled French helmer named Maud, the uneasy-making story re-creates a situation in which the helmer cast a known con man to star in her next film, only to be swindled by him in the process. Between its perverse power games and co-dependent sadomasochism, the almost frigidly unsentimental pic seems an ideal double bill with Roman Polanski's "Venus in Fur," but will likely prove too personal to attract much of an audience.